The seven can’t-miss cultural products coming out in Toronto this December
Bruce McCall, the Ontario-born painter best known for his wry New Yorker covers, has teamed up with his long-time friend David Letterman on This Land Is Made for You and Me (But Mostly Me), a prickly lampoon of one per cent hubris. The idea came after Letterman complained to McCall that ultra-wealthy tycoons were pillaging the wilderness to expand their own plutocratic playgrounds. So they conjured the most obscene indulgences they could imagine: the fire insurance baron who builds the world’s longest fireplace out of rocks from Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, the Bangalorean mogul who commandeers the tip of Mount Everest for the roof of his Park Avenue apartment (shown above), the pubescent Silicon Valley megabillionaire who relocates the Taj Mahal to California for a spacious new crib. Letterman’s fake magazine-style essays are sharper than anything you’ll hear on his show, and McCall’s Creamsicle-coloured illustrations look like vintage postcards from Bizarro World. As with all good satire, the book strikes just the right balance between screwball fantasy and eerie plausibility—Barbra Streisand’s real-life basement shopping mall would fit right in.
Somehow, in between illustrating the new David Rakoff book and running his old-timey barbershop in Guelph, the cartoonist Seth has found time to create retro cover art for the new Criterion release of Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 film City Lights.
In Anchorboy, a manic memoir from Sportsnet’s Jay Onrait, we learn that the wisecracking broadcaster was once pounded on live TV by an MMA fighter; that alone is worth the sticker price.
Rush: Clockwork Angels Tour, the latest live concert DVD release from the sexagenarian rock gods, features 25 minutes of candid backstage footage and a rare sound-check performance of the classic track “Limelight.”
Chris Hadfield, the universally beloved Canadian space cowboy, recounts his Gravity-calibre close calls—including the time his helmet sprung a leak, temporarily blinding him on a spacewalk—in his new book, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth.
After being locked in a motel room for 20 years, a man seeks vengeance on his captor in Oldboy, the Spike Lee–helmed remake of the deranged South Korean thriller. Former MuchMusic VJ and current New Girl star Hannah Simone makes her first feature film appearance.
A decade after their acclaimed debut, scream-rock duo Death From Above 1979 is still hard at work on a follow-up. In the meantime, lead singer Sebastien Grainger has released a frenetic, synth-heavy pop record called Yours to Discover.
McCall illustration courtesy of Penguin Canada; Photograph of Simone by Getty Images
